THE THIN MAN: Blu-ray (MGM, 1934) Warner Archive
Celebrated
mystery/crime author, Raymond Chandler once remarked that his contemporary,
Dashiell Hammett “took murder out of the drawing room and put it back in the
gutter where it belonged.” Indeed, though perhaps he elected to keep one
foot in the parlor…for propriety’s sake, or simply to plumb and straddle both
ends of the spectrum. Eulogized in the New York Times as ‘the dean of the
hard-boiled school of detective fiction’, Hammett’s penchant for stylish
thrillers has become something of the model for anyone attempting the pulpy
crime/fiction genre since. Hammett’s trademark was forever shaped by his participation
in both World Wars, and, his former life as a Pinkerton Guard before embarking
on his second career as a lucrative writer. Repeatedly stricken with
tuberculosis, a condition worsened by his chronic addiction to tobacco (this
would ultimately lead to his death from lung cancer at the age of 66), Hammett
wrote, drank and smoked – prolific in his authorship, and extolling the virtues
– as well as the vices - of the hard-bitten realist, thrust in the middle of
some wildly original and usually salacious crime du jour. Hammett’s crime
solvers always possess a passion for the
truth, justice and the American way, though, even more tantalizing, not always driven
to find the ‘moral good’ in his characters.
The Thin Man is one of
Hammett’s most enduring crime/thrillers, not the least for its witty sex/comedy
banter between newlyweds Nick and Nora Charles, nor even it being immortalized on
celluloid at MGM in 1934, one year after its runaway success in book form.
Ironically, this was to be Hammett’s last novel. For the record then, none of
the cinematic sequels that spawned the lucrative Nick and Nora franchise at
Metro were inspired by Hammett books, although Hammett was hired by the
studio to write screenplays for two subsequent installments; 1936’s After
the Thin Man and 1939’s Another Thin Man. In hindsight, these remain
the best of the six atmospheric outings to co-star William Powell and Myrna
Loy. The character of Nick Charles shares in Hammett’s own pros and defects;
Nora, his Nob Hill heiress/wife, modeled on wry playwright and authoress,
Lillian Hellman whom Hammett wed the second time around and stormily lived with
until his death. Nick is a breezily boozy, if occasionally jaded ex-Pinkerton
detective, repeatedly dragged into the thick of some sensational society murder
that fascinates his upper-crust wife, unaccustomed to this darker side of
humanity.
Very little
translation was required by the screenwriting team of Albert Brackett and
Francis Goodrich to finesse the prose of The Thin Man into Metro’s smash
hit of 1934. Under the direction of W.S. Van Dyke, known for his prudence,
economy and straight-forwardness, The Thin Man remains as urbane, acidic
and charming as Hammett’s page-turning novel; a gutsy, occasionally ghoulish
whodunit with Powell and Loy as the quintessential saucy and sexy screen couple.
Powell’s Nick Charles is playfully glib – when he is not drinking – and utterly
immune to taking his work seriously – ever! Loy’s Nora is the lanky brunette
with a wicked jaw and a taste for fashion; the pluperfect gal Friday with a
penchant to invigorate their marital sparring. Together, and much to Nicky’s
chagrin, they become inveigled in an investigation over the disappearance of a
scientist, Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis) after his anxious daughter, Dorothy
(Maureen O'Sullivan) implores Nick to investigate what foul play has befallen
him. If The Thin Man (and is subsequent sequels) have a flaw, it’s that,
to today’s more jaundice and critical eye, Nick’s frequent frolics with the
bottle are taken far too lightly. Alcoholism is not a joke – true. But this
franchise treats it with invigorating jest; perhaps typified in a telephone
query about their whirlwind honeymoon made to Nora by her mother in the first
sequel, whereupon Nora nonchalantly replies, “Yes, we had a good time. Nick
was sober in Kansas City” to which Powell’s Nick, casually chomping on an
ice cube while nursing a cocktail, turns to an over-sized stuffed teddy bear to
comment, “That is a bitter woman.”
William Powell
and Myrna Loy are one of those perfect screen teams in Hollywood lore, so
succinctly fitted into our collective movie-land memories we cannot imagine one
without the other today. And yet, each embarked upon a star-making career apart
from the other, and, with varying degrees of success. In the days long before
the internet ruined all hope of any star living a private life, many a fan chose
to believe, either, that a real romance was brewing between these frequently
pitted co-stars or that, in fact, they were already secretly married. In
reality, Loy was wed to MGM producer, Arthur Hornblow Jr. – the first of four
husbands – and Powell, then engaged to Metro’s platinum sex bomb Jean Harlow,
after the untimely death of her first husband, producer, Paul Bern. Harlow’s
tragic demise at the tender age of 26 in 1937, coupled with Powell’s discovery
he was stricken with cancer that same year created a 2-year hiccup in The
Thin Man franchise, from 1937 to 1939. For the record, Powell recovered
from both the loss and his illness. Over time, Powell and Loy’s reputation as
the ‘perfect marrieds’ became overshadowed by that other iconic coupling
of Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. But it was Powell and Loy who set the
standard in the thirties, their appearance together in 1934’s Manhattan
Melodrama – co-starring Clark Gable, leading MGM’s raja, L.B. Mayer to
reteam them - sans Gable - in The Thin Man, and subsequent Thin Man
sequels, as well as such memorable fare as 1936’s Oscar-winning musical biopic,
The Great Ziegfeld and 1941’s ebullient screwball comedy, Love Crazy.
Truth to tell:
Mayer had very little faith in The Thin Man; just another B-thriller
likely to fade into obscurity, though perhaps, also to turn a tidy little
profit for the studio besides. Herein, we pause. One has to sincerely admire
both Mayer and the studio system – neither perfect, yet both willing to take a
gamble on projects and programmers that, more often than not, hit the bull’s
eye with astounding accuracy to meet and exceed the pulse of the public.
Reportedly shot in just 12 days, The Thin Man is a superb example of that
system with all its pistons firing in unison. At $226,408 The Thin Man
may have been budgeted only as a disposable programmer (today, you cannot even
shoot a 30 second Super Bowl commercial for this). Nevertheless, Van Dyke
delivered a movie so chic and funny it easily caught the public’s fascination.
The same year as its debut, in a national poll conducted by Look Magazine,
Clark Gable and Myrna Loy were awarded the coveted titles and crowns as ‘King’
and ‘Queen’ of the year, prompting Powell – a celebrated raconteur, to
send Loy a conciliatory flower box loaded with old, dirty and rotting grapes,
and, a card that read, “From William – the fourth”. As Loy later
explained with a chuckle, “He had come in fourth in the poll and these, of
course, were sour grapes!”
The success of The
Thin Man (it grossed $1,423,000 worldwide) was not lost on Mayer. Indeed,
by the mid-1930’s, Mayer had suckled a franchise from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
vine-swinger, Tarzan and was about to launch two more enduring series
with Dr. Kildare and Andy Hardy. His V.P. in Charge of
Production, Irving G. Thalberg, did not care for this sort of streamlined and
economized picture-making. Thalberg’s passion leaned rather severely toward the
costly and opulent. In the end, both endeavors turned a profit for Metro,
though only Mayer’s would outlast the decade after Thalberg’s untimely passing
in 1936. In the decades long since passed, the infectious teaming of Nick and
Nora Charles has become the inspiration for such smash hit television series as
Moonlighting and Hart to Hart. But even before these valiant
successors, Metro was not above re-mining its fortune and glory for ripe new
profits; The Thin Man translated into a 1950’s TV serial costarring
Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk. Running from 1957 to 1959, it had limited
appeal and distribution. Yet, it is primarily for the galvanized reputations of
William Powell and Myrna Loy that The Thin Man endures to this day;
Powell’s debonair, yet casual good nature, and Loy’s delicious flippancy, a
perfectly baked soufflé of wit and sophistication, unimpeachable at a glance,
and thoroughly Teflon-coated from the misnomers of ever-changing times and tastes.
The plot of the
original Thin Man is subdued and tame by today’s ‘in-your-face’
standards, but revolves around newlyweds, Nick and Nora Charles arrival in New
York after a whirlwind romance and marriage. Nick’s early retirement from sleuthing
is predicated on the fact he has married a wealthy socialite who does not seem
to mind his inexplicable lack of desire to support her, but rather relishes
being the ‘kept man’. Although based in San Francisco, the couple have already
embarked upon their honeymoon, stopping in Manhattan for the pending Christmas
holidays. Alas, joy galore and the quiet life are not to be for this serenely
contented, if slightly screwball marital coupling. Nick encounters Dorothy
Wynant (Maureen O'Sullivan) inside a fashionable downtown club. She reminds him
of an earlier meeting; her father, scientist, Clyde Wynant (the eponymous ‘thin
man’) – a former client, since vanished into thin air. Arriving late to
this party, her arms full of Christmas packages and mercilessly tugged at the
end of a leash by their beloved wire-haired terrier, Asta, Nora is also
introduced to Dorothy. Nora takes pity on the girl, despite Nick’s
protestations in wanting ‘a quiet life’.
Thus, the
investigation begins. It seems the curmudgeonly Clyde was toiling on a
mysterious experiment for Washington when Dorothy arrived on the arm of her
fiancée, Tommy (Henry Wadsworth); the couple announcing their intentions to
marry with all speed. Pleased, though distracted, Clyde promised Dorothy he
would be back from his secret business trip in time for the wedding. He never
arrived. Regrettably, what began as a ‘missing person’s’ case takes on
more sinister undertones when Wynant's ex-secretary and love interest, Julia
Wolf (Natalie Moorhead), is found murdered. All evidence points to Wynant as
the prime suspect. Ever the devoted daughter, Dorothy refuses to believe her
father is guilty. Meanwhile, Wynant’s
ex, the money-grubbing Mimi’s (Minna Gombell) only concern is that her former
hubby’s disappearance will put a stop payment on the ‘hush money’ since
re-marrying to one Chris Jorgensen (Cesar Romero) – an elegant gigolo.
Frustrated by Wynant’s absence, and coaxed by Nora, Nick and Asta revisit the scientist’s
laboratory. Asta unearths skeletal remains. Although police still believe
Wynant killed Julia, Nick proves the body in the lab is Wynant, based on some
shrapnel lodged in one of the femur bones.
Already
suspecting the real murderer, Nick and Nora stage a lavish whodunit dinner
party. After some polite badinage, Nick settles into the real purpose for their
gathering, laying out the clues as he has discovered them. We learn Mimi was
aiding Wynant’s attorney, MacCaulay (Porter Hall) in an embezzlement scheme in
exchange for more money on the side. Having exposed Chris as a bigamist, Mimi became
free to divorce him and inherit all of Wynant's money. Rather ruthlessly, now
she incriminates MacCaulay, whose fraud eventually caught Julia’s eye. Rather
than remain loyal to Wynant, Julia began blackmailing MacCaulay and this
directly led to her being murdered by him to keep her silent. MacCaulay is also
responsible for Wynant’s untimely demise after he finally discovered what had
been going on right under his nose. MacCaulay’s escape at gunpoint is foiled by
Nick. After a brief struggle he is subdued and taken into custody. Nick, Nora,
Dorothy and Tommy board a train; a newlywed foursome happily bound for the
sunny shores of California.
Despite its
meager budget, The Thin Man is an A-list release from
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; the studio then, with ‘more stars than there are in
heaven’. L.B. Mayer paid Dashiell Hammett $21,000 for the rights to produce
it with director, W.S. Van Dyke encouraging Hackett and Goodrich to concentrate
their efforts more heavily on the repartee between Nick and Nora, using
Hammett’s authorship merely as their guideline.
Van Dyke was also instrumental in convincing Mayer that William Powell
was not ‘too old’ to play the part, and Myrna Loy – then, being groomed
as something of an exotic ‘bird of paradise’ – could equally don the
garb of a cosmopolitan sophisticate. Skippy, rechristened as ‘Asta’,
proved a star in his own right, in huge demand shortly thereafter and cast in
two screwball classics, The Awful Truth (1937) for Columbia, and, Bringing
Up Baby (1938) made at RKO. Alas, Asta’s high-spiritedness on the set of The
Thin Man caused him to bite Loy on the finger. For the record, Hammett’s
novelized hound had been a schnauzer, not a wire-haired fox terrier. Nevertheless,
Asta’s reputation as a charming, if high-strung sidekick, would endure
throughout the Thin Man series, and frequently become the focus,
unearthing pertinent clues to aid in Nicky’s crime-solving endeavors.
Affectionately
known around the MGM lot as ‘One-take Woody’, Van Dyke’s economy in
picture-making has never been equaled. He seems instinctively to have known
when and where to place his camera and what to cover in a single shot, rarely
photographing a scene more than twice. In fact, for William Powell's first
scene in The Thin Man, Van Dyke instructed the actor to play around with
mixing a cocktail, feeling his way through the nightclub set while improvising
his dialogue. The legend is Van Dyke told Powell he was merely blocking of the
scene, the camera lazily following Powell around the set as he performed these
perfunctory duties, though hardly in a perfunctory way. When the scene was
finished, Powell was startled to hear his director holler, “That’s it! Print
it!” Indeed, cast were soon to discover this as the order of the day, kept
on their toes, learning new lines and bits of business on the fly, and then,
shooting with little time to fully prepare or rethink their instincts.
Ultimately, this created a sense of impromptu charm, the exchanges between
Powell and Loy taking on an immediacy that seems, at once, spirited, and yet
completely laid back.
One scene became
the exception to this house rule: the penultimate dinner party, where Powell
became so thoroughly confounded by the complexities of his lengthy monologue
that he repeatedly flubbed his lines. The result was an unanticipated
consequence; the real oysters being re-served to dinner guests putrefying from
the intense heat given off by overhead arc lamps. It created quite a stench on
the set. While co-star, Maureen O’Sullivan did not appreciate Van Dyke’s
technique, some years later, Myrna Loy would recognize the genius in Van Dyke’s
‘off the cuff’ precision, crediting him with The Thin Man’s brisk
and breezy pace and spontaneity. “He paid attention to our easy
conversations between takes,” Loy later recalled, “…and worked as much
of that into the picture as he could.” And Powell, for his part, absolutely
adored working with Loy. “We forgot about technique, camera angles, and
microphones,” he admitted, “We weren't acting…just two people in perfect
harmony. Myrna has the happy faculty of being able to listen...she has the give
and take that brings out the best.”
The Thin Man was a colossal
hit for MGM, racking up the dollars as well as unprecedented unanimous critic’s
praise for its lithe concoction of comedy and thrills. Today, it remains one of
the cleverest adaptations of a popular novel ever turned out. In 1997, The
Thin Man was added to the United States National Film Registry of
culturally, historically and aesthetically significant motion pictures. As with all of its subsequent Thin Man
sequels, (there are five all told) the plot is incidental to the on-screen
chemistry of William Powell and Myrna Loy. Regrettably, the former glory of this
classy classic has remained buried for far too long on home video. Owing to a
disastrous fire at George Eastman House in 1978, all original nitrate negatives
of The Thin Man were lost. While the loss was epic – in theory – MGM was
one of the first studios to adopt a very proactive ‘preservation’ program, carefully
inspecting and transferring their assets to updated film stocks. So, although The
Thin Man’s original silver nitrate had been incinerated, the picture itself
survived in one form or another. Not all of these surviving elements were ideal.
And so, virtually all home video incarnations until now were cribbing from…well…elements
of marginally ‘good’ to highly suspect quality – resulting in home video reincarnations
that ranged from Warner Home Video’s 1997 DVD - passable if hardly perfect - to
MGM/UA’s defunct 1984 VHS tape, which was atrocious. In absence of any original
camera negatives, fine grain masters and duplicate printing negatives (‘dupes’)
were cobbled together to yield the best results, except that old film stocks
did not necessarily ‘dupe’ well in the old days.
To so unearth
the miracle that is The Thin Man on Blu-ray now is to truly
discover buried treasure of the highest order. The Warner Archive (WAC) has
spent nearly a year in preparing this deep catalog release for hi-def, melding
dupes and fine grains into a pastiche of loveliness that no collector ought to
be without, and, not even the most discerning and critical eye should be able
to find fault. So, get out the champagne and Ticker tape, because WAC has
achieved results most of us could only have dreamed about in a ‘perfect world’
scenario. While the main titles marginally suffer from that ‘dated’ early thirties’
residual softness, with a slight gritty texture, once we segue into the main
body of the piece, we are treated to one phenomenal jab of pleasure laden upon
the next. So, ‘prepare to be astonished’, as they used to say. Visual
discrepancies between the fine grains and dupes – and ‘dupes’ from ‘dupes’ have
been massaged away to create a thoroughly homogenized viewing experience with
no jarring transitions. Film grain is always in check. The image retains that
gorgeous velvety sheen that eludes to its former nitrate glory, and snaps
together – mostly – with refinement and clarity unseen since the thirties; and
certainly, never before experienced on home video. While fine grains make up
approximately two-thirds of this release, even when utilizing dupes, extraordinary
digital clean-up has been paid to yield remarkable results. Retained, are
minute hints of age-related wear; some thin, and wholly forgivable scratches,
barely visible and hardly worth mentioning, except to say they remain without
ever becoming a distraction. As with the visuals, WAC has sweetened the 2.0 DTS
audio subtly, retaining the anomalies of early Westrex recording, while minimizing
– if not eradicating – its shortcomings. There are no extras, but we can
certainly forgive WAC their absence, because money has been spent correctly on
restoring this true gem in the MGM library. I cannot think of a single reason
why The Thin Man on Blu-ray should not be a ‘day one’ purchase for every
cinephile. Can the rest of the Powell/Loy Thin Man franchise in hi-def
be very far behind? What about The Great Ziegfeld too? Bottom line: very
– VERY – highly recommended!
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
5+
VIDEO/AUDIO
4.5
EXTRAS
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